U.S. pays $75 million to finance regime change
By Neil MacFarquhar
International Herald Tribune
Iran is in the throes of one of its most ferocious crackdowns on dissent in years, analysts say. with the government focusing on labor leaders, universities, the press, women's rights advocates, a former nuclear negotiator and Iranian-Americans, three of whom have been in prison for more than six weeks.
The shift is occurring against the backdrop of an economy so stressed that although Iran is the world's second-largest oil exporter, it is on the verge of rationing gasoline. At the same time, the nuclear standoff with the West threatens to bring new sanctions.
The hard-line administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the analysts said, faces rising pressure for failing to deliver on promises of greater prosperity from soaring oil revenue. It has been using U.S. support for a change in government as well as a possible military attack as the pretext to hound his opposition and its sympathizers.
Some analysts described the government's reaction as a "cultural revolution," an attempt to roll back the clock to the time of the 1979 revolution, when the newly formed Islamic Republic combined religious zeal and anti-imperialist rhetoric to assert itself as a regional leader.
Equally noteworthy is how little has been permitted to be discussed in the Iranian news media. Instead, attention has been strategically focused on Ahmadinejad's political enemies, like the former president, Mohammad Khatami, and the controversy over whether he violated Islamic morals by deliberately shaking hands with an unfamiliar woman after he gave a speech in Rome.
Iran 's police chief boasted that 150,000 people were detained in the annual spring sweep against any clothing considered not Islamic — a number far larger than in springs past.
More than 30 women's rights advocates were arrested in one day in March, Human Rights Watch reported, five of whom have been sentenced to prison terms of up to four years. They were charged with endangering national security for organizing an Internet campaign to collect more than a million signatures supporting the removal of all laws that discriminate against women.
Eight student leaders at Tehran's Amir Kabir University, the site of one of the few public protests against Ahmadinejad, disappeared into Evin Prison in early May. Student newspapers had published articles suggesting that no humans were infallible, including the Prophet Muhammad and Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The National Security Council sent a stern three-page warning to all newspaper editors that detailed banned topics, including the rise in gasoline prices and other economic woes like possible new international sanctions, negotiations with the United States over the future of Iraq, civil-society movements and the Iranian-American arrests.
Hadi Ghaemi, an Iran analyst for Human Rights Watch, said the entire campaign was "a strong message by Ahmadinejad's government, security and intelligence forces that they are in control of the domestic situation."
The analyst added: "But it's really a sign of weakness and insecurity."
At least three prominent nongovernmental organizations that pushed for broader legal rights have been closed down outright, while hundreds more have been forced underground. A recent article on the Baztab Web site said that about 8,000 nongovernmental organizations were in jeopardy, forced to prove their "innocence," basically because the government suspects all of them of being potential conduits for about $75 million the United States has earmarked to promote a change in government.
Professors have been warned against attending overseas conferences or having any contact with foreign governments, lest they be recruited as spies.
Analysts trace the broadening crackdown to a March speech by Khamenei, whose pronouncements carry the weight of law. He warned that no one should damage national unity when the West was waging psychological war on Iran. The country has been under fire, particularly from the United States, which accuses it of trying to develop nuclear weapons and of fomenting some of the violence in Iraq.
Ahmadinejad and other senior officials have dismissed all the criticism as carping. The president blames the previous administration for inflation and calls it media exaggeration, while Tehran's chief prosecutor, Said Mortazavi, said Iranians who oppose the Islamic Republic look for an excuse to criticize it.
The three Iranian-Americans have all been detained essentially on the grounds that they were either recruiting or somehow abetting a U.S. attempt to achieve a "velvet revolution" in Iran.
They are being held in the notorious Section 209 of Evin Prison, the wing controlled by the Intelligence Ministry, and have been denied visits by lawyers or relatives. Iran recognizes only their Iranian nationality and has dismissed any diplomatic efforts to intervene.
A rally to demand their release is set for Wednesday outside the United Nations.
The three are Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant with the Open Society Institute; and Ali Shakeri, of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California at Irvine. A fourth, Parnaz Azima, a journalist who works for Radio Farda, a U.S.-financed station based in Europe, has been barred from leaving the country.
"People don't want to come to conferences, they don't even want to talk on the phone," said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University. "The regime has created an atmosphere of absolute terror."
To the political crackdown, Ahmadinejad adds a messianic fervor, Milani noted, telling students in Qum this month that the Muslim savior would soon return. The appeal of such a message may be limited, however.
Iran 's sophisticated middle class wants to be connected to the world, and grumbles that the country's only friends are Syria, Belarus, Venezuela and Cuba. But it might play well with Ahmadinejad's main constituency.
"They are the poor, the rural," said Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations. "They don't travel abroad, they don't go to conferences. He is trying to undermine the social and political position of his rivals in order to consolidate his own people."
Most ascribe Ahmadinejad's motives to blocking what could become a formidable alliance between the camps of Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani, both former presidents. Parliamentary elections are scheduled early next year, and the next presidential vote in 2009.
"Having to face a single pragmatic conservative and reform bloc is extremely threatening," Nasr said, hence the intimidation of all possible supporters.
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